My work is an investigation of the midcentury traces within America’s populated landscape seen in ruins along the nation’s highway corridors. Focusing on the tropes of the motel, thefast food franchise and the automobile that carries us to them, I ask my viewer to look again at the literal and implied signs that surround us. Specifically, I am interested in the mythology of the American hyperreal which semiotician Umberto Eco defines as the confusion of reality with the symbol for reality. Eco writes, “The American imagination demands the real thing, and, to attain it, must fabricate the absolute fake”1. As a culture, Americans have come to defineourselves by what we want to be true rather than reality. We prefer Astroturf to real grass because Astroturf is greener, requires no upkeep and will not die. It is better than the realthing.